Dead Letters: The Book on the Bench

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

This is the only dispatch I have ever filed in which I am the villain.

In the early 1970s I was acquainted with a journalist named George Feifer, an American who had spent time in the Soviet Union and written a novel out of it called The Girl from Petrovka — the story of an American reporter and a Russian girl, and the machinery of the state that ground down everything between them. It was a good book. I told him so, and I meant it, which was rare enough in my dealings with authors that he believed me.

Feifer owned a copy of his own novel that he treasured above the others. It was marked throughout in red ink — his own annotations, made over the course of writing and rereading, notes on what he'd meant, what he'd missed, what the Russian phrases truly carried that the English could only approximate. It was, he said, the only copy that contained the book he had actually intended to write, as opposed to the one that got printed. The margins were the real novel. The text was just the part everyone else got to see.

I asked to borrow it. I wanted to write something about the annotations — about the gap between the book a writer publishes and the book he keeps. Feifer hesitated, then handed it over, with the particular reluctance of a man lending out a thing that cannot be replaced.

I lost it.

I want to be precise about how, because the imprecision is the worst part. I had it in my car, on the seat, in London. My car was broken into one night — a smashed window, a few things taken, the usual urban indignity. Among the things gone was Feifer's annotated copy. Whoever took it did not want a literary novel about Soviet Moscow. They wanted whatever they could carry, took the book by accident along with the rest, and discarded it somewhere between my car and wherever they ended the night. I never found it. I told Feifer. He was gracious in the way that is worse than anger. He said books travel. He did not lend me anything again.

I carried that for two years. The single irreplaceable copy of another man's life's work, lost out of my car because I could not be bothered to bring it inside. It is the kind of small, stupid failure that does not photograph well and does not make a good anecdote and simply sits in you, going nowhere.

Then, in 1973, Feifer told me the rest of the story, and years later he told it to the whole of Britain when The Sunday Times asked its readers for their most extraordinary coincidences.

A Welsh actor named Anthony Hopkins had been cast in the film of The Girl from Petrovka. To prepare, he went looking for the novel in the bookshops of London and could not find a single copy — it had sold through, or not yet been stocked, and after a day of fruitless searching he gave up and went to the Leicester Square underground station to catch his train home. While he waited, he noticed a book abandoned on the bench beside him. He picked it up. It was The Girl from Petrovka. He took it home and used it to build his performance, paying particular attention to the notes someone had made, in red ink, throughout the margins.

Two years later, on the film's set, Hopkins met George Feifer. Feifer mentioned, in passing, that he no longer owned the copy of his book that mattered to him — he had lent it to a friend, and the friend had lost it out of a car in London.

Hopkins went and got the book he'd found on the bench. He brought it back and asked if it might be the one.

It was. The red ink was Feifer's own hand. The annotations were the real novel. The single irreplaceable copy that I had lost out of my car had been carried off by a thief, discarded on a bench in a station in a city of eight million people, and found there — by accident, in a moment of defeat — by the one actor on earth who needed exactly that book, who then carried it across Europe and handed it back to the man who wrote it.

It found its way home. It simply declined to use me as the means.

I have thought about this for a very long time. Every other failure in my career has stayed a failure — the closed window, the erased name, the man I did not recognise at the edge of a trench. This is the only one the universe saw fit to repair, and it repaired it by going around me entirely, as if to make clear that the rescue had nothing to do with the fool who caused the problem. I lost the book. Someone better than me found it. That is the whole shape of my life in a single sentence, and I did not even get to be in the room when it landed.

I never got the quote. I lost the book.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.